Major Sir Thomas Chalmers Hetherington, (18 September 1926 – 28 March 2007), better known as Sir Tony Hetherington, was a British barrister. He was Director of Public Prosecutions of England and Wales from 1977 to 1987, and was the first head of the Crown Prosecution Service for the year after it was founded in 1986. Early life Hetherington was born on 18 September 1926 in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. His father was a doctor. He was educated at Rugby School. He read law at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1951, and was called to the Bar in 1952 at the Inner Temple. Career Military career On 5 January 1947, he was granted an emergency commission into the Royal Regiment of Artillery, British Army, as a second lieutenant. He was promoted to lieutenant on 11 May 1948. He saw active service in the Middle East in the aftermath of World War II. He continued to serve in the Territorial Army until 1967, rising to the rank of major. Battery Commander of P (7th London) Battery 254 City of London Regiment Royal Artillery (TA) Legal career He joined the government legal service, in the legal department of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. He became part of the legal team supporting the Attorney-General and the Solicitor General in 1962. He was head of the permanent legal staff of the Law Officers from 1966 to 1976. He was appointed CBE in 1970, and became Deputy Treasury Solicitor in 1975. The Home Secretary Merlyn Rees appointed him Director of Public Prosecutions on the retirement of Sir Norman Skelhorn in 1977, with a brief to reduce delays in the criminal legal system. Soon after taking office, he took the decision to prosecute Jeremy Thorpe, who was acquitted of plotting the murder of his former homosexual lover. Hetherington became a QC and a bencher of Inner Temple in 1978, and he was appointed KCB in 1979. In 2017, the enquiry in to child abuse was told that Hetherington had untruthfully told two newspapers that his office had never received police reports of abuse by the Liberal MP, Sir Cyril Smith. The later years of his service were dominated by wide-ranging changes to the criminal legal system in the UK. A perceived miscarriage of justice after the murder of male prostitute Maxwell Confait, and a subsequent critical report by the retired High Court judge Sir Henry Fisher in